The invention relates to transmitting data by radio. More precisely, the invention relates to a method of changing the supervisor program installed in a receiver station for receiving a radio beam, in a supervisory network.
In general, in a radio supervisory network, a main station (or master station) transmits a radio beam to one or more terminal stations.
The radio beam carries in particular a main path for conveying traffic data (or customer data), and a plurality of service paths for conveying data for supervising the network (in particular such as data associated with network configuration, the various protocols implemented, alarms, etc.)
If the distance between the main station and the terminal station is too great, one or more intermediate stations are then used, each of which serves as a repeater by receiving and re-transmitting the radio beam.
In the present description, the term "receiver station" is used in a very general sense to mean any station of the type for receiving a radio beam and operating under a supervisor program that it stores. Therefore, the term "receiver station" is used herein to designate both a terminal station and an intermediate station.
For various reasons, it may be necessary to replace the current supervisor program in a receiver station with a new supervisor program. When it is desired to modify the way in which the supervision of the network is operated, a new supervisor program for each of the receiver stations in the network must be developed and then installed to replace the old supervisor program. In addition, because networks are growing rapidly, it is becoming increasingly frequent to develop several successive versions of the same supervisor program. For each new version of the program, it is necessary to reinstall it in all of the receiver stations in the network.
In the state of the art, two main techniques are known that enable such a supervisor program to be changed.
In a first known technique, a person takes means for storing the new supervisor program (e.g. a floppy disk) to the site of the receiver station and loads the new supervisor program into the receiver station.
That first known solution suffers from the drawback of requiring staff to be sent to the receiver station. Staff must be sent to each of the receiver stations in the network and the overall cost of that is high (in terms both of labor costs and of travel expenses). Moreover, in view of the ever increasing rate of growth of currently installed networks, that total cost is tending to increase still further, because of the number of receiver stations, and because the distances to them are becoming increasingly long.
The second known technique consists in connecting the receiver station via a cable network to a network element storing the new supervisor program. The new supervisor program is then down-loaded by cable into the receiver station.
The second known solution suffers from the drawback of requiring a dedicated link between the receiver station and the network element storing the new supervisor program. Such a dedicated link is very rarely used, which makes it costly and inefficient.